Does anyone have any sounds or music from video games that used to terrify them when they were young (or even now, I'm not judging)? There's a couple for me that I can can think of off the top of my head.

Whenever I played Diablo with my cousin and we'd get to the floor with the Butcher. I mean the whole game creeped me out (especially that part, I was only little), but when you open the door to his lair and he would growl "Ahh...fresh meat!!"

Haha, that Sonic drowning music is an excellent choice. That gave me plenty of pants-soiling moments and I hated all aquatic areas as a result. All Diablo 1 music are also excellent choices.

For my money and when I was a kid, it was the first opening sounds of the battle music of The 7th Saga. It's not terrible on paper and you hear it all the freaking time in the game, but when you consider how off-the-rails difficult some of the random encounters can be, knowing you may die an unfair death and lose an hour of unsaved progress....ugh. Ugh, ugh, uuuugggghhh. You have to listen to this before you see which enemy encounter you get, and you spend that whole time just praying it's an easier one.

Both of my original Super Nintendo controllers have a bad rattle inside from something I knocked loose, because I would throw the controller in rage after some of these BS fights.

When you're playing as GDI in the final mission thinking you're building up a strong base and you hear three dreaded words: nuclear warhead approaching. Then you watch as half that base gets wiped out.

Whenever I played Diablo with my cousin and we'd get to the floor with the Butcher. I mean the whole game creeped me out (especially that part, I was only little), but when you open the door to his lair and he would growl "Ahh...fresh meat!!"

While I can't say I was terrified, I will never forget that as long as I live. A buddy I grew up with had a PC and that demo before the game was out and I don't know how many times, in the wee hours of the morning, we raided The Butcher and took his cleaver.

I wouldn't call it terrifying so much as unsettling, but for a long time starting in my late 20s, I developed a tic (while trying to quit smoking) where I would flinch every time a random encounter began in any rpg. It faded recently, but I was worried that it was going to plague me for the rest of my life.

As for sounds that terrified me, that's a tough one. Gaming makes me feel pretty invulnerable. Most games are designed to stop me from winning for as long as it is interesting for me, the player, to continue to tolerate, and not as a rule any longer.

I have spent so much time playing different games over the years that I have come to expect this behavior instinctively. Virtua Fighter 2 never really made me feel this way, to be honest, and it's the reason I actually never developed much interest in it. It's hard in the name of realism, giving by its nature less thought to the comfort of the player's experience.

Getting back to the point, knowing that the game is mostly and usually just trying to entertain me usually mitigates quite a bit of the fear I would have otherwise experienced.

That being said, there is one sound which scares me quite a bit that I heard from a videogame, though it was completely unintentional on the part of the programmers.

When a NES softlocks, it will often continue playing whatever note it was playing back at the time it locked. To have this happen at a crucial moment in a NES game (which could be quite intense) was often horrifying, because it kind of slapped you in the face with a game over without so much as a warning. Bonus horror if you were playing a battery backed game, because these softlocks could often erase your save file.

For that matter, I will forever live in fear of the sound of a Nintendo falling on the floor after some dunderhead (often me) tripped over the cord.

And on a similar note...

I once was playing Final Fantasy III for the SNES, a system I got used to thinking of as reliable in ways I have just described its predecessor as not necessarily having been; but it could produce glitches from time to time, and this particular one kind of weirded me out. It also has never happened to me again since that day.

I got on the Phantom Train at Doma, and the melancholy piano waltz began playing as the sound of the wheels bumping over rail endings faded away. Everything was normal, I had heard this before...

Then the timpani began playing a beat early, and continued to strike a beat early as the music (the fat horn riff) started.

My eyes kind of went saucer like and I reset the game, wondering if my FFIII cart was haunted! Still gives me the willies to this day.

Normally, I don't bug out for sounds unless my (purposefully vague) phobia gets triggered. But, when playing SH4 I got the proverbial life startled out of me. There's a scene where a character can stray across unhallowed (and seemingly alive) ground and proceeds to start talking in tongues. The distortion track they use over the character's voice is an old film trick that's been used for ages for demonic possession. Needless to say, a cold chill went through me and I was terrified. This sound distortion technique is why I've stayed away from horror movies for the most part and still gets me every time I hear it to this day.